Other Events

JULY

Some Strange Elsewheres: Travel Poetry from the Beats on

University of Bedfordshire, Bedford campus, 4 July 2013
Keynote speakers: Tim Youngs and Michael Horovitz
Please submit an abstract (250 words) for a twenty-minute paper and a brief biographical blurb totravelpoetry@beds.ac.uk by 28 February 2013. Presenters will be notified by March 22.

The American poet Billy Collins has often called poetry ‘a kind of travel literature’, even ‘the original travel literature’. ‘I want the reader to be in the sidecar, ready,’ says Collins. ‘Then off we go. Then we can take a ride from what seemed to be a hospitable and friendly environment into an environment that’s perhaps disorienting, manipulative, or a little off balancing. I want to start in a very familiar place and end up in a strange place.’ Although Collins admits he spends more time at home these days, looking out the window, than he does travelling the world, some of his earliest influences were the Beat poets, who purposely sought out the strangest places and the most disorienting experiences. During his extensive travels around India in the early 1960s, Allen Ginsberg soon discovered, as he sat on the ghats with the saddhus, sharing chillums, the best way to remember those places and record those experiences in his diaries was through the medium of poetry, not prose.

Beginning with and following on from the examples of Ginsberg and the other Beat poets, we welcome papers that explore as many poetic responses to travel as possible. How have the Beats altered our attitudes towards both travel and travel writing? Does postwar travel poetry, like postwar travel prose, travel light, go slowly and carry less cultural baggage? How do postwar poets see ‘home’? How do they see ‘abroad’? How have the poets from these ‘strange elsewheres’ written back? Do the flexible forms of contemporary poetry express the experience of travel better than prose? Is the lyric the ultimate form of travel literature? How have postwar poets transformed the long tradition of travel writing?

MIGRATION (including a strand of panels: “Through Dido’s Eyes: The Arab Spring in Literature and the Arts”)

CALL FOR PAPERS: The BCLA invites conference papers on the theme of migration, understood as the migration of texts, stories, and myths across cultures and time, media, genres and species, as well as the migrations of peoples across lands, seas, and worlds.

In collaboration with the British School at Rome and the School for Libyan Studies, the BCLA Migration conference will include a dedicated strand of panels, readings, and performances entitled “Through Dido’s Eyes: The Arab Spring in Literature and the Arts”. Dido, an exile, woman, ruler, builder, symbol of the complexity of northern Africa, and the interconnectedness of the Mediterranean, presides over the collaboration between the Society for Libyan Studies, the British School at Rome, the BCLA, and the University of Essex. The aim is to create new links between BASIS institutions and the Arab world, and to explore with colleagues from the areas affected by the Arab Spring some of the cultural resonance of this remarkable historical moment.

The Colonial/Postcolonial New Researchers Workshop

Institute of Historical Research, London. Deadline: 15 July 2014

The Colonial/Postcolonial New Researchers Workshop is currently inviting abstract submissions for the 2014/2015 academic year. The workshop was established in 2008, to provide a forum for postgraduates and new researchers to meet and present their work in an informal environment. Seminars run on a bi-weekly basis at the Institute of Historical Research (IHR), intercalated with Imperial and World History (www.history.ac.uk/events/seminars/124).

We invite proposals for papers or panels on any aspect of colonial or postcolonial history. We particularly welcome proposals that address specific methodological, interdisciplinary or theoretical concerns. Potential themes for papers, panels or discussions might include, but are not limited to:

Methodology and current issues in colonial/postcolonial studies

Environment, social and spatial landscapes

Media, literature and literary imaginations as historical sources

Performance and representation

Bodies, health, and welfare

Family, kinship, childhood, and memory

Sexualities, genders, and intimacies

Borders, encounters, conflict zones

Diasporas, migration and metropole-colony transactions

Labour, commodities, and consumption

Transnational comparisons/comparative empires

Nationalism, minorities and the State

Anyone interested in presenting their work, whether finished pieces or works in progress, is encouraged to submit an abstract of between 250-350 words to cpnewresearchers@gmail.com. Abstracts should be submitted by no later than 15 July 2014. Decisions will be made in early August.

SHAW Writing Workshop

Deadline: 13 July 2014

The Society for the History of Women in the Americas (SHAW) is delighted to be hosting its third writing workshop for postgraduate students on Wednesday 23rd of July 2014 at the University of Cambridge, 1pm-6pm. The workshop is a forum for students to submit a piece of their writing (around 2,000 words in length), receive feedback for their work from fellow postgraduates and discuss all the trappings of academic writing. The organisers hope to provide an informal environment in which postgrads can network and practice the defence of their thesis. The event will be free to attend and is open to postgraduate historians studying any aspect of the history of the Americas.

It is asked that submissions are sent to the below email address by Sunday 13th July. If you would be interested in attending or would like to know more, please contact Jon Coburn (Northumbria University) at:?

shawwriting@gmail.com

[here attached shaw postgrad workshop cfp]

Deadline: 13 July 2014

The Society for the History of Women in the Americas (SHAW) is delighted to be hosting its third writing workshop for postgraduate students on Wednesday 23rd of July 2014 at the University of Cambridge, 1pm-6pm. The workshop is a forum for students to submit a piece of their writing (around 2,000 words in length), receive feedback for their work from fellow postgraduates and discuss all the trappings of academic writing. The organisers hope to provide an informal environment in which postgrads can network and practice the defence of their thesis. The event will be free to attend and is open to postgraduate historians studying any aspect of the history of the Americas.

It is asked that submissions are sent to the below email address by Sunday 13th July. If you would be interested in attending or would like to know more, please contact Jon Coburn (Northumbria University) at: shawwriting@gmail.com

Crisis, Civility, Imaginaries and Revolt: New Politics for the Global City?

Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University
25-26 July 2013
Convenors: Shameem Black and April Biccum
Humanities Research Centre 2013 Conference

The nineteen nineties witnessed an avalanche of scholarship on globalization. These included work on the networked nature of imaginaries, media and communication, and the material and economic geographies of global cities. Saskia Sassen drew scholarly attention to the term Global City in 1991 with her text, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo.

With the consolidation of conurbations in many regions throughout the 1980s, and the growth of finance and the global service economy, the Global City took on both an analytic hue and a status of desire signaling a new kind of geographic power in the global economy that lent weight to the idea that state boundaries were eroding in favor of new kinds of global connections through trade, services, finance and migration. In 2001 Sassen updated the terrain of engagement with her edited volume titled Global Networks, Linked Cities which examines how cities in the Global South are displaying some of the indices of the Global City previously reserved for advanced post-industrial economies and thereby generating new socio-economic patterns that threaten to shift the balance of the Global Economy.The rise to prominence of Brazil, India, and China and the context of the Global Financial Crisis make for a real possibility that the centres of gravity in the global economy could radically shift. Cities that were previously under the radar of global-talk have entered the global imaginary via the American occupation and popular uprisings of the Middle East. Cities like Kabul, Kandahar, Baghdad, Basra, and Homs for obvious reasons may reflect the inverse of the indices of the Global City, but their nightly appearance on the evening news contributes also to a shifting global imaginary. New modes of artistic representation, emerging from both elite media and popular culture, have helped to stretch the concept of what a global city is and can be. The Occupy movements in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis have also shifted the parameters of urban civility, civic engagement, democratic politics, and resistance as they try to reconfigure the uses of public space and open the terrain of the politically possible in the name of the 99%. Indeed the Global Financial Crisis itself, with bank closures, bail-outs, the sovereign debt crisis, the threat to the existence of the Euro-zone, urban resistance to austerity and the resurgence of far-right politics in many European cities are daily challenging the notion of a Global City as the hub of globalization. This conference seeks to explore these themes and examine the present and futures of the shifting Global City.
We invite papers and panel proposals on the following themes:

Cities in emerging economies

The impact of the GFC on Global Cities in the global north or south

The Arab Spring and new geographies of resistance

History and the Global City

‘Planet of Slums’, urban migration and unevenness

Modern day slavery and the shadow economy

The Occupy Movement and new imaginaries of resistance

The role of art, literature, and popular culture in defining Global Cities

In Search of “Man-Making Words”: Masculinities, Citizenship and the Nation: 1750 – 1945

Friday 26th July 2013
Keynote speakers: Ana Carden-Coyne (University of Manchester), Rachel Woodward (Newcastle University). This conference will also feature a roundtable discussion with the keynotes and John Strachan (Northumbria University).
Deadline for abstracts: 1st February 2013. We aim to notify successful speakers by the beginning of March 2013. Please email all abstracts and queries to manmakingwords@gmail.com

‘Unless one is five and a half feet tall, has a bass voice and a beard on one’s chin, one has no business being a man’ (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie, ou La nouvelle Héloïse, 1761)
‘BE A MAN – THAT is the first and last rule of the greatest success in life’ (Albert J. Beveridge, The Young Man and the World 1905)

Although there is a growing body of scholarly literature focusing on theories of masculinity in the social sciences, attention to the construction of masculinities remains underrepresented across the arts and humanities, despite feminist scholarship being a well-established field. For example, while R.W.Connell’s concept of hegemonic masculinities (1995) is a mainstay of scholarship in the social sciences, it rarely surfaces in a discipline such as literary studies. This conference aims to redress this imbalance by asserting the value of investigating and exploring constructions of masculinity in the arts and humanities.
For the full CFP and more information, please visit: http://manmakingwords.wordpress.com/

AUGUST

Job opportunity: Lecturer/Senior Lecturer in English

1 year, fixed term maternity cover, Nottingham Trent University
Applications are sought from suitably qualified candidates with research and teaching interests in postcolonial literatures and gender and sexuality.
Closing date – 5pm on 18 August 2013, Interview date – w/c 02 September 2013
For more information please visit http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/AGY874/lecturer-senior-lecturer-in-english/
To submit an online application for this position please visit www.ntu.ac.uk/vacancies.
If you require documentation in alternative formats (e.g. Braille, large print) please contact us at job.vacancies@ntu.ac.uk
If you have any specific queries in relation to this position, please contact Nahem Yousaf, Academic Team Leader for English, Culture and Media Studies on +44 (0)115 848 3032 or via email nahem.yousaf@ntu.ac.uk

EXHIBITION Artist: Pratchaya Phinthong

26 July-1 September, Chisenhale Gallery, London

The exhibition is by artist Pratchaya Phinthong who has been exploring The ‘Broken Hill’ skull, the first early human fossil found in Africa and provided the primary evidence to support Darwin’s theory of evolution, proposing humans as the natural descendants of primates. Discovered by Zambian miners in 1921, the skull was taken to London by the British colonial authorities and a replica stands in its place in a Lusaka museum.
For more information please visit the following website: www.chisenhale.org.uk

Incarceration and Mass Political Movements: Expression, Repression and Resistance

Call for Papers – Newcastle University Postcolonial Research Group Seminar Series, 2013/14 Deadline: 30 August 2013

About the Seminar Series:
The 2013/14 seminar series focuses on the role incarceration has played in the history of political and resistance movements across the globe. It is 50 years since Rev. Martin Luther King wrote a letter from Birmingham Jail in which he writes movingly of the everyday experiences of being Black in the USA and the need for the civil rights struggle. The anniversary of the composition of the letter offers the inspiration for this year’s postcolonial seminar series, which will build towards the Martin Luther King Memorial Lecture at the end of the year.

We therefore wish to invite speakers whose research speaks to the issues this letter raises including; mass movements, incarceration, and resistance. We are interested in scholars from all fields examining the social, political or creative aspects and impacts of mass movements or incarceration. The seminar series provides a good space to explore new ideas and work in progress and we particularly we encourage early career scholars and postgraduate students to present their research.

Expressions of Interest. If you would like to present as part of this seminar series please send us a brief 200-300 word expression of interest containing:

UEA International Creative Writing Course in India

Calcutta, 28 August 2014-5 September 2014. Deadline: 18 July 2014

Following on the success of its first three creative writing workshops in India, the University of East Anglia (UEA), where the United Kingdom’s oldest and highest-ranked school of creative writing is located, is organising a fourth workshop to be held in Calcutta from 28th August to 5th September 2014.

The theme of this workshop is Exploring the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, and it will be led by Amit Chaudhuri, award-winning author and UEA Professor of Contemporary Literature, and Booker-shortlisted novelist and poet Jeet Thayil.

Modelled on UEA’s pioneering Creative Writing MA, the eight-day course will be for students who wish to develop their skills as writers of creative non-fiction through a series of intensive workshops, tutorials, lectures, public talks and other events. In this workshop, they will also be encouraged to ponder on a selection of unclassifiable prose texts, and reflect on the advantages of challenging generic compartments such as autobiography, reportage, and fiction.

Twenty four places are available on the course which begins on 28th August 2014. Course fees are Rs 25,000 (Indian Rupees), approximately £290 (British pounds), excluding travel and accommodation. A limited amount of financial support in the form of one fee waiver and two partial fee waivers will be available to appropriately qualified candidates to meet the costs of participating. Mona Sen Gupta (ahavacommunications259@gmail.com), the local administrator for the workshop, will advise successful applicants about accommodation and other queries.

Critical Pedagogies: Equality and Diversity in a Changing Institution

This one-day interdisciplinary and crossdisciplinary symposium aims to open up discussions regarding teaching in our changing institutions, investigating how our roles as both teachers and learners are continuously challenged and negotiated. We welcome proposals for papers of 15-20 minutes from established scholars, postdoctoral researchers, postgraduate students, independent researchers and educators from various backgrounds. We also welcome alternative formats for presentation, such as workshops or other dialogical arrangements (please note your suggested time format for this on the proposal, if different from the 15-20 minutes paper time format). Proposals should be no more than 300 words, in .doc format, and should include a brief 50-word biography. Please submit your abstracts no later than 1st April 2013 to criticalpedagogies@ed.ac.uk.

History, Postcolonialism and Tradition

Third Biennial Conference of the Postcolonial Studies Association Kingston University, 12-13 September 2013

The organisers of the 2013 Postcolonial Studies Association would like to invite proposals for papers on this year’s theme: ‘History, Postcolonialism and Tradition’. The theme is designed to facilitate the opportunity for interdisciplinary dialogue, particularly (but not exclusively) between the spheres of literature, cultural studies, anthropology, the visual arts, the performative arts, folklore, history, politics, and the social sciences.

Issues of history and tradition remain sites of significant contestation for postcolonial studies. Whilst postcolonial studies focuses increasingly on ‘future-thinking’ this is in tension with, and reliant upon, a continued need to negotiate the postcolonial cultures’ relationship to often violent histories and the marginalisation of indigenous traditions. Equally, global and diasporic cultures are the sites of complex interplays of productively competing traditions and forms of remembrance. Issues include but are not limited to:

Negotiations of history and tradition in literature, creative writing and the visual arts

History and/or tradition as source of/barrier to political and social change

Transformations of history and tradition in the context of global and diasporic identities

Confirmed keynote speakers include Robert Irwin (author of The Arabian Nights: A Companion and For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and their Enemies) and Sadhana Naithani (author of In Quest of Indian Tradition and The Story-Time of the British Empire: Colonial and Postcolonial Folkloristics).

Short abstracts (approx. 300 words) should be sent to the organisers, Sara Upstone and Andrew Teverson, at the following address: fass-conferences@kingston.ac.uk. The deadline for proposals is 15 April 2013.

The Lives of Objects

Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, 19-22 September 2013.
Submission deadline: 31 January 2013.
Papers may offer biographical accounts of particular objects; and the organisers also invite papers that reflect on the methodology of object biographies or outline existent projects concerned with objects’ lives; papers considering the influence of life-writing on material history and/or archaeology; papers exploring the relationship between curating and auto/biography; the history of the book; the history of museums; and any other facets of the conference theme. The organisers also invite submissions for an informal workshop, in which delegates will present and discuss the lives and meanings of individual objects.Please see the conference website (www.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/clusters/life-writing/events/lives-objects) or emailrachel.hewitt@wolfson.ox.ac.uk for more information.

Diasporic Constructions of Home and Belonging

The Marie Curie Initial Training Network “Diasporic Constructions of Home and Belonging” (CoHaB) unites world-leading experts in this field in the conviction that interdisciplinary training as well as international and intersectoral co-operation is key to any productive study of diasporas.

Our globalised world is shaped by international migration. Large numbers of individuals and often entire groups or even nations are on the move for a wide variety o reasons. This phenomenon creates massive challenges to nation states and civil societies, culturally, economically, and politically, but also creates opportunities and new perspectives in an unprecedented degree. The study of diaspora and migration has therefore evolved into a burgeoning field of research with an urgent practical relevance.

For sending in abstracts as well as further information, please contact Marlena Tronicke, M.A. atmarlena.tronicke@wwu.de.

New Topographies of the Postcolonial.

Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry – CALL FOR PAPERS
The deadline for submission of the essay is September 30, 2013.

At a time when disciplines are scrambling to keep up with both the accelerations and upheavals of a global informational economy and radical geopolitical shifts away from Euro-American dominance, how might literary postcolonialism be reconfigured? Since the turn of the century, we have witnessed genuine shifts in world literary flows brought on by proliferating information technology and translation networks; by transformed territorial and economic alignments in a post-Soviet era; and by the emergence of multiple war zones and new ethnic and religious conflagrations. Large-scale humanitarian crises wrought by wars and catastrophic climate change have brought new subalterns into our moral economy – asylum seekers, climate refugees, illegal migrants, and even large swathes of the Muslim populace demonized as a consequence of the ghoulish global visibility of fundamentalist versions of political Islam.

A critical response to these developments on the part of postcolonial literary scholars ought not to ignore emergent literary topographies that can no longer be circumscribed by classical postcolonial geographies of Europe and its others. They demand new modes of comparative analysis: conceptual, philological, translational, textual, generic and, broadly, the aesthetic.

Essays may range the spectrum from the transregional to the planetary and include under the rubric of the transregional, literatures from the Middle East, Asian and African influences on Anglophone and Francophone literatures, and literary/linguistic travel among post-plantation economies that bypass a now defunct colonial economy. Contributions from a planetary perspective may include essays on novelization in the era of humanitarian wars, subaltern literary genres of the information age, and literary works on climate change. The essays should be up to 8,000 words long including both notes and bibliography.

Fanon in Italy: A Special Issue for Interventions

Edited by Neelam Srivastava and Robert Young
Those wishing to submit an article for this special issue should email an abstract/expression of interest (300-500 words) to Robert Young, robertjcyoung@gmail.com and Neelam Srivastava,neelam.srivastava@ncl.ac.uk.
The deadline for the submission of abstracts is September 30, 2013.
We are also organizing a symposium on this topic on June 11, 2013, which you are very welcome to attend. If you’d like more information about this, please email Neelam Srivastava at the above address.

Call for submissions:
This special issue seeks to solicit scholarly contributions on Frantz Fanon’s political, cultural and intellectual relationship to Italy: a place where he spent a considerable amount of time, where he forged important friendships and connections, and where he delivered a part of his famous essay, “On National Culture”, at the Second Congress of Black Writers and Artists in 1959 in Rome (later expanded and included in The Wretched of the Earth).

In that same year, in Rome, he was the victim of a failed assassination attempt, about which few details are known (Macey 2000: 394). We seek to examine how a focus on his presence and activities in Italy can shed more light on his intellectual and political formation, especially in his connections to several Italian anti-colonial left intellectuals who shared a common wartime, anti-fascist experience with Fanon (he had fought with the Free French during the Second World War). The issue also seeks to contextualize Italy more fully as a site of anti-colonial activism, conveniently located in the South of Europe, a symbolic gateway to Africa and the Mediterranean, and a country more politically sympathetic to the Algerian independence movement than most other European nations. In this issue, we also hope to uncover a series of connections, texts and films that trace the considerable influence Fanon had on both Italian Third-Worldist/leftist intellectual milieux, and on Italian critical theory today. The most obvious example of his influence is in Gillo Pontecorvo’s cinematic masterpieces, La battaglia d’Algeri (1966) and Queimada [Burn!] (1969), whose intertextual links with Fanon’s writing are well documented. But Italian intellectuals such as Giovanni Pirelli, an Italian writer, editor, and political activist, who produced a remarkable edition of Fanon’s Selected Works in Italian, were also crucial to the dissemination of Fanon’s political thought in Italy. Fanon’s imprint is visible in Pirelli’s exceptional books of testimonies about the Algerian war, for example Racconti di bambini d’Algeria. Pirelli worked with Fanon to create this book consisting entirely of testimony from Algerian refugee children about the war.Beyond Pirelli and Pontecorvo, the influence of Fanon in Italy also extends to Valentino Orsini’s relatively forgotten film, I dannati della terra (1969), whose title is taken from The Wretched of the Earth. Relying heavily on montage and pastiche, it presentsan extended reflection on the failure of the European left to connect with Third-World liberation struggles. It engages in an intense dialogue with Fanon (at one point the main character is reading Black Skin, White Masks alongside Mao and Che Guevara). This is an exemplary postcolonial film long before postcolonialism became a widespread critical and aesthetic category.More generally, Fanon and his concept of a new humanism, plus his total commitment to the Algerian cause and to Third-Worldism, had a strong appeal for Italian left intellectuals who were coming from the experience of the Resistance. Finally, we hope to uncover possible intellectual genealogies linking Fanon to Italian critical thought, such as connections between his Marxism and that of Antonio Gramsci; but also the continuing engagement with his thought by contemporary Italian critics such as Giorgio Agamben, Antonio Negri, Sandro Mezzadra, and Iain Chambers.

We welcome contributions on the following topics relating to Fanon in Italy (but please feel free to suggest additional ones not on this list):

Fanon’s reception in Italy (in history, culture, politics)

Fanon’s presence and interventions at the Second Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Rome, 1959, organized by Présence Africaine

The failed assassination attempt against Fanon in Rome, July 1959

Fanon and the developments of Italian Marxism, e.g. operaismo (workerism)

Fanon’s friendship with Giovanni Pirelli, including relevant letters/documents in the Pirelli archive

Fanon’s influence on Italian cinema (e.g. Pontecorvo and Orsini)

The influence of Italian thinkers on his intellectual and political formation (e.g. Antonio Gramsci)

The operation of the FLN organization in Rome and its connections to the Italian Communist Party

Contextual information about Fanon’s meetings with Sartre, which took place in Rome

Connections with other anti-colonial organizations/leaders in Rome /Italy

OCTOBER

Constructions of Identity – Contemporary Challenges
Cluj-Napoca, 24-26 October 2013
Abstracts of about 100 words should be submitted by September 1, 2013.

The Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Letters, “Babes-Bolyai” University, Cluj-Napoca (Romania) announces the 7th edition of its biennial conference. This conference’s main goal is to examine the challenges and the future of English and American Studies along three major directions: Literary Studies, Language Studies, and Cultural Studies, at the beginning of the 21century, in the era of digitalization and globalization.

More specifically, we invite presentations in the fields listed below:
Literary studies:

British and Commonwealth literature

American literature

Literary theory

Language studies:

Theoretical linguistics

Applied linguistics: ELT

Applied linguistics: Translation studies

Cultural studies:

Literature and culture

Gender and ethnicity

Film and media

The conference will host keynote speeches and workshops. The participants in the workshops are allotted a 30-minute slot for presentation and discussion. The general conference fee is 250 lei (about 60 €), to be paid upon arrival. This includes: participation costs, coffee breaks, lunches on Thursday and Friday, the conference dinner on Thursday and the publication in the conference volume.
For details and registration, please visit the conference website:http://constructionsofidentity7.wordpress.com/cfp/
For additional information, please contact: Dr. Adrian Radu adrian.radu@ubbcluj.ro or Dr. Petronia Petrar petronia.petrar@gmail.com

Social Water (an interdisciplinary postgraduate workshop)

25th October 2013, York University
The day will feature a keynote speech by Dr Kimberley Peters, Lecturer in Human Geography at Aberystwyth University, and will conclude with a roundtable discussion led by Professor Graham Huggan of the School of English at the University of Leeds.
Abstracts of 250 words for 20 minute papers should be sent to Hannah Boast, hkb503@york.ac.uk, by 13 September 2013.

This workshop takes water’s various forms as a provocation and invitation for postgraduates to present similarly diverse critical perspectives on water’s social meanings. It offers a unique opportunity for constructive interdisciplinary conversations on this emerging and vital subject.
Topics to consider might include, but are not limited to:
Water privatisation
Water on film
Water in ecocriticism and environmental studies
Gendered engagements with water
Water in religion, performance and ritual
Waterscapes – the sea, rivers, coastlines, marshes
Disasters and reconstruction
Embodiment, memory and affect

NOVEMBER

ARIEL Call for Papers: Special Issue on Global Pedagogy

The deadline for submissions is November 1, 2013.

Scholarship on contemporary globalization has emphasized the rapid acceleration and scale of global mi¬gration. Recent estimates suggest that roughly a tenth of all Nigerians and Filipinos live abroad, to give just two examples. Literary studies is not insulated from the conditions of accelerating global migration. As the editors of the 2001 PMLA special issue on globalization emphasized, “literary studies is … being rapidly globalized” (18), and many fields of literary study are adopting a transnational orientation. Teachers of English themselves are increasingly migratory, and the study of literature in English is increasingly a glo¬balized occupation. Nigerian and Filipino professors teach Nigerian and Filipino fiction in American uni¬versities; American educators teach British literature in Oman and Kazakhstan; Chinese professors teach American literature in Canada. North American universities are increasingly opening satellite campuses in foreign countries and recruiting students from overseas for North American campuses. The global spread of the English language has coincided with the global spread of literature instruction. Whether this global dissemination of literature in English is a benign form of cross-cultural interaction or a more sinister form of cultural imperialism, it is mediated by literary texts and the study of those texts. And regardless of how we judge them, the global dissemination of the English language and the global migration of teachers of English-language literature have implications for pedagogy as well as global culture.
This special issue of ARIEL on global pedagogy explores the nature, effects, and implications of teaching literature in English in global contexts. How is English pedagogy being reinvented in the contemporary global milieu? What new methods and assumptions are forming around the teaching of literature in English? How is contemporary pedagogy constrained or shaped by the economic and institutional forces driving globalization? What is the relationship between institutions of higher learning, nation-states, and multinational corporations, and how do these relationships affect the teaching of literature? Does the discipline of English serve or challenge the interests of national governments, multinational corporations, and cultural hegemony? How is the teaching of literature in English shaped by different cultural contexts and student audiences? How has the global teaching of literature in English changed over time in response to different local and global pressures and paradigms? What are the effects of the increasing global migra¬tion of students and institutions of higher learning? We seek articles that explore these and related issues.

Please send 300-word proposals and a brief CV to Guest Editor Jane Bryce, Professor of African Literature and Cinema, Department of Language, Linguistics and Literature, University of the West Indies, Barbados, at the following address: <jane.bryce@cavehill.uwi.edu>

CALL FOR PAPERS: Caribbean Postgraduate Network

1st November 2013, University College London
Deadline: 13th September

The Caribbean Postgraduate Network invites abstracts of 250 words from Postgraduate students in Caribbean Studies for their annual workshop, taking place at the Institute for the Americas, University College London, on Friday 1st November 2013.

Postgraduate students located in discipline-based departments often find they are the sole scholar within their department working on the Caribbean. The Caribbean Postgraduate Network seeks to bring together students who share a common interest in the Caribbean to share their work with regional specialists in a friendly and informal setting. The workshop will feature student presentations on aspects of their work, with responses by convenors and questions encouraged from other participants.

We welcome submissions from postgraduate students across disciplines who are researching any aspect of the wider Caribbean and its diasporas. We encourage proposals from students at various stages within their postgraduate research. Participants will be invited to give a 20-minute presentation.

Abstracts should be submitted by Friday 13th September to Rachel Thompson at pa901rt@gold.ac.uk with the subject heading ‘Caribbean Postgraduate Network’. Please include your university affiliation.

Salman Rushdie in the 21st century: Swallowing a world

University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies, 7-8 November 2013
Contact email: sr.Ix.2013conference@gmail.com
Keynote speakers: Abdulrazak Gurnah, Vijay Mishra, Priyamvada Gopal
Abstracts (max. 300 words) and other queries should be sent to sr.lx.2013conference@gmail.com by 31 December 2012. Please include the full title of your paper, name, institutional affiliation, contact information (postal address and e-mail address) and a short bionote.

Following the announcement of the release in September 2012 of Salman Rushdie’s memoir, Joseph Anton (alias adopted while under a fatwa that sentenced him to death in 1989), it seems timely to survey the relevance of the work of such a prolific author in the 21st century. The impact it has had, since 1975, on various aspects – cultural, literary, ideological, political, and even theoretical, inextricable of the development of postcolonial studies – deserves the critical attention that an event such as this international conference is able to generate.

Post-2000 monographs and volumes of essays on Rushdie’s work have largely followed a literary-based trajectory and adopted a postcolonial and/or postmodern reading of the Rushdie corpus with the result that the critical methods employed have often remained narrowly inscribed in a particular disciplinary field and that the lion’s share of this research has focused on themes of globalisation, migrancy, and cultural hybridity.
Without intending to downplay the relevance of these themes, indeed central to Rushdie’s work and will be more than welcome as topics of presentations and panels, this international conference aims to gather Rushdie scholars and add new critical itineraries and frameworks of interpretation of the writer’s fiction and non-fiction. In this sense, it is an event intent on examining not only Rushdie’s writings, but also his subsumption into an image-making machinery as star literary author, global brand, and celebrity intellectual. Of special interest to this conference are presentations which scrutinise, from various disciplines and research areas, Rushdie’s life-long oeuvre, an oeuvre open to multiple readings, and also presentations which look at the roles performed by Rushdie across multiple creative platforms including, besides those of novelist and short story writer, also those of public intellectual, reviewer, and film critic. Furthermore, assessing Rushdie’s influence on other authors (For example; his role as gatekeeper for South Asian writing in English), will be an expected output of this conference.
Considering that Rushdie’s oeuvre and public persona (what might be termed the “literary Rushdie” and the “non-literary Rushdie”) will certainly act as a facilitator for interdisciplinary dialogue, the aim of the organizers is to bring together a truly interdisciplinary group of scholars from literature, cultural studies, anthropology, history, politics, the social sciences and other related disciplines.
Accordingly, topics and themes of interest include, but are not restricted to, the following:

Rushdie’s recent work (both literary and as a screenwriter, film critic, etc.)

Resurrecting the Book

15th to 17th November 2013; Library of Birmingham, Birmingham UK
Keynote speakers: Professor Sir David Cannadine (Princeton University), Dr David Pearson (Director of Culture, Heritage & Libraries, City of London Corporation), Professor Johanna Drucker (University of California, Los Angeles), Professor Nicholas Pickwoad (University of the Arts, London)
DEADLINE FRIDAY 1 FEBRUARY 2013
Abstracts of no more than 400 words accompanied by a 50-word biographical profile should be sent to both: Dr Matthew Day at m.day@newman.ac.uk and Dr Caroline Archer atcaroline.archer@bcu.ac.uk.
To celebrate the opening of the largest public library in Europe and its outstanding special collections The Library of Birmingham, Newman University College, Typographic Hub at Birmingham City University and The Library of Lost Books have united to host a three-day conference on the theme of Resurrecting the Book in the new Library of Birmingham, Birmingham UK
For the CFP and more information please visit: http://resurrectingthebook.org/.

Caribbean Sexualities

All are welcome to this free event. However, places are limited. To register, or to request a postgraduate/early career travel bursary, please contact Dr Nicola Abram: n.l.abram@reading.ac.uk For further information, please contact Professor Alison Donnell: a.j.donnell@reading.ac.uk

In recent years, some of the most urgent and highly-charged public and political debates in the Anglophone Caribbean have centred on sexual citizenship. While it is important to acknowledge the very real barriers and prejudices that face people in relation to sexual freedoms and the urgent struggles and challenges that are ongoing, it is also important to recognize and affirm that Caribbean expressive cultural forms have – for a long time – given life and voice to a whole range of ways of living and loving. This workshop will discuss recent representations of Caribbean sexualities across different disciplines.

The workshop will feature two roundtable discussions: the first with Alison Donnell, Keon West, and Sexualities in the Tent speakers; the second entitled ‘Reading Sexualities, Reading Literature’, with Denise deCaires Narain, Kate Houlden and Wendy Knepper. Writers Lawrence Scott and Bernardine Evaristo will read from their works, and Campbell X will present clips from the film Stud Life.

The Trans-Atlantic, the Diaspora, and Africa. THE 2013 CALLALOO CONFERENCE

November 27-30, 2013, Hosted by The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH). For more information please visit http://www.torch.ox.ac.uk/taxonomy/term/73

This conference advances and challenges the newest theoretical scholarship emerging from the interdisciplinary fields of U.S.A.-derived Diaspora Studies and British-derived Trans-Atlantic Studies, as these fields have diverged and converged in relation to the idea of Africa. ‘The Trans-Atlantic, the Diaspora, and Africa’ also showcases African Diasporan creative writers, established and emerging, from Africa, the Caribbean, the U. K., and the U.S. A. for readings in Oxford and London.

Britain, Europe and the African Diaspora

Callaloo Postgraduate/Early Career Workshop
27 November 2013; Race and Resistance Network, The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH).
Deadline: 20 of September 2013
On 27-30 November 2013, Callaloo will be hosting its annual conference in Europe for the first time, at The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH). To mark the occasion, Oxford’s newly established Race and Resistance Network will be hosting a postgraduate/early career workshop on the 27 November. The workshop will assess the related fields of diasporic, global and transnational African and African American studies by focusing on the multivalent roles of Britain and Europe. Many of the most recent developments in the field have taken the U.S. or Africa as the starting point and/or key frame of reference. This workshop will seek to explore how the story of any given transnational topic changes when Europe, including Britain becomes a central focus of the story. We welcome applications on any topic that fits this framework: such as (but not limited to) antislavery, church based and religious movements, intellectual and literary networks, emigration and immigration, anti-imperialism, civil rights, citizenship and identity, Black Power, women’s movements, cultural transfer, white supremacy and anti-immigration, hip hop, global justice movements and so forth.
The workshop will include up to 12 papers. To ensure maximum participation, the papers (which can be in draft form) will be precirculated ten days ahead of the workshop, and presentations will be 8 minutes “speaking to the paper” rather than the usual conference style, followed by commentators and group discussion. Some of the papers may be included in a forthcoming special issue of Callaloo on this theme. If you would like to offer a paper, please send a 250-300 word summary, and details of your institution and career stage, to callalooworkshop2013@gmail.com by Friday the 20 of September 2013. We welcome papers from postgraduates and scholars who have completed their doctoral thesis within the last eight years. For more information please visithttp://www.torch.ox.ac.uk/raceresist

Reframing Disaster Conference

University of Leeds, 28–29 November 2014 Deadline: 15 August 2014

2014 is a significant year for commemorating and thinking through the legacies of major global catastrophes. This year marks the 30th anniversary of Bhopal Gas Disaster in India, the 20th anniversary of the Rwandan Genocide, and the 10th anniversary of the South Asian tsunami. While much attention is being paid to the centenary of World War I, we would like to counterpoint this by considering the politics of remembering, commemorating, and supporting long-term recovery in relation to a range of compound catastrophes that have deep colonial roots. Given that Bhopal, Rwanda, and the Tsunami have all generated significant media interest alongside diverse forms of creative response (from art to social activism), this conference will explore how these and other postcolonial disasters have been defined and represented following the initial event. It will examine the particular challenges posed by different forms of disaster (industrial, environmental, social), and connect these with aid and reconstruction work across multiple sectors.
The conference is connected to an AHRC-funded research project led by Dr Anthony Carrigan, entitled ‘Representing Postcolonial Disaster’, and will be part of a week-long series of activities designed to coincide directly with the Bhopal disaster’s 30th anniversary on 2–3 December, and with the South Asian tsunami’s 10thanniversary later that month. The overall event has been planned in collaboration with the Bhopal Medial Appeal and local community groups, and will be inclusive and public-facing, with film screenings, school workshops, and exhibitions being staged throughout the week with the core aim of stimulating public visibility and discussion. It will include an exhibition by the world-renowned Indian photographer Raghu Rai (the first photographer to document the Bhopal disaster), along with contributions from writers, artists, filmmakers, publishers, and charity representatives who have worked to publicise and support recovery efforts in relation to these disasters.
We would therefore also like the conference to be self-consciously public-facing, and to speak across diverse sectors and audiences. We are keen to feature presentations from a range of disciplines and stakeholders, with a particular focus on: issues of political and artistic representation (including novels, poetry, films, popular culture, and visual art); colonialism and disaster; the politics of remembering, commemorating, and forgetting; the geopolitics of aid; and social activism and remediation. Possible topics include:

Historical and contemporary responses to postcolonial disasters in art and media;

The challenges of recovery, reconstruction, remediation, and justice;

Local, ethnographic, and diasporic perspectives on disasters;

Bhopal, Rwanda, and the South Asian Tsunami in comparative frame, including relationships with other forms of postcolonial disaster;

Abstracts should be written with cross-sector and non-academic audiences in mind, and we would welcome a variety of possible formats that will engage the public (e.g. poster presentations, creative pieces and art exhibits, roundtable discussions), with conventional papers to be limited to 15 minutes. Please submit 250-word proposals along with a short bionote to Dr Shamira Meghani (postcolonialdisaster@gmail.com) by 15 August 2014.
For further details of the ‘Representing Postcolonial Disaster’ research project, see:https://arts.leeds.ac.uk/postcolonialdisaster/; for updates on the ‘Reframing Disaster’ conference, please follow our separate event website (www.postcolonialdisaster.com) and Twitter feed (@PocoDisaster) . This event is supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK, and Creative and Cultural Industries Exchange, University of Leeds.framing disaster cfp

DECEMBER

Wednesday 13th November 2013 and Tuesday 17th December 2013
University of Salford
Deadline for Applications: 15 August 2013
We are pleased to announce that we are now accepting proposals from individuals working on any aspect of contemporary literature (post-1916) for our AHRC funded two-day, interactive training event entitled #postC20literaryresearch: Digital Engagement in Theory and Practice. Across these two days participants will be given full training and supported in producing a digital engagement output in the form of a podcast. The event is scheduled for Wednesday 13th November and Tuesday 17th December and applicants must be available to attend both days.
Further details about the project and this event can be found on our website www.thec21scholar.com. There are a limited number of places and all applications will be judged based on the quality of the proposed podcasts.
If you have any enquiries please do not hesitate to contact us at salford@thec21scholar.com.

2015

The British Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies Conference

The Hilton Savannah DeSoto, Savannah, GA, February 13-14, 2015

Deadline: 1 November, 2014 The British Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies Conference, inaugurated in 1992, is the oldest and longest-running annual meeting of its kind in the United States. It encompasses colonial and postcolonial histories, literatures, creative and performing arts, politics, economics, and all other aspects of the countries formerly colonized by Britain and other European powers.

There is no restriction to any particular political/cultural ideology or to specific critical practices. The Colonial, Postcolonial, and Decolonized eras all are of interest. We welcome and seek to encourage a variety of approaches and viewpoints, and the generation of wide-ranging, productive debates.

Interdisciplinary and cross-cultural, the conference offers scholars and researchers, teachers and students, the opportunity to disseminate and discuss their knowledge and understanding of the dynamic, important field of postcolonial studies.

Or any other aspect of the British Commonwealth of nations, or of countries formerly colonized by other European powers.

Deadline: The deadline for proposal submissions is NOVEMBER 1, 2014. Notification of acceptance will be completed by December 1, 2014. For further information, please visithttp://bcpcsconference.com/cfp.html